CPU Usage

The cpu input plugin, measures the CPU usage by the system and per CPU core in a percentage unit between every second of time. At the moment this plugin is only available for Linux.

The following tables describes the information generated by the plugin. The keys below represent the data used by the overall system, all values associated to the keys are in a percentage unit (0 to 100%):

key

description

cpu_p

CPU usage of the overall system, this value is the summatory of time spent on user and kernel space. The result takes in consideration the numbers of CPU cores in the system.

user_p

CPU usage in User mode, for short it means the CPU usage by user space programs. The result of this value takes in consideration the numbers of CPU cores in the system.

system_p

CPU usage in Kernel mode, for short it means the CPU usage by the Kernel. The result of this value takes in consideration the numbers of CPU cores in the system.

In addition to the keys reported in the above table, a similar content is created per CPU core. The cores are listed from 0 to N as the Kernel reports:

key

description

cpuN.p_cpu

Represents the total CPU usage by core N.

cpuN.p_user

Total CPU spent in user mode or user space programs associated to this core.

cpuN.p_system

Total CPU spent in system or kernel mode associated to this core.

Getting Started

In order to get the statistics of the CPU usage of your system, you can run the plugin from the command line or through the configuration file:

As described above, the CPU input plugin gathers the overall usage every one second and flushed the information to the output on the fifth second. On this example we used the stdout plugin to demonstrate the output records. In a real use-case you may want to flush this information to some central aggregator such as Fluentd or Elasticsearch.

Configuration File

In your main configuration file append the following Input & Output sections: